Art and Art Exhibitions: Year In Review 2005

Photography

Much of the photography exhibited in 2005 involved an exploration of “how we looked then,” in work that revisited actual and reconstructed historical sites of past interest. Returning to the early days of photography, the Eugène Atget retrospective, which was held September 10–November 27 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, showcased 120 photographs of Paris from 1890 to 1926.

The work of Hungarian photographer André Kertész (1894–1985) traveled to the International Center of Photography (ICP), New York City, in a comprehensive exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where it originated in 2004. The show then traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and was on view at the ICP from September 16 to November 27. The subtle and elegant work displayed in this exhibition brought to view Kertész’s quiet observations of Paris and New York City in the years following 1925 and his unique juxtapositions of light and form.

The January–March exhibition “Peter Hujar: Night” at Matthew Marks Gallery, New York City, included 43 square-format black-and-white after-dark images from 1974 to 1985 that depicted the margins of New York City. The show, informed by Hujar’s gritty sensibility and experience as a street photographer in New York City’s East Village, was also mounted March 10–April 30 at the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco. P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, N.Y., presented 70 images of his work, most previously unexhibited; Hujar died of AIDS in 1987. The exhibit was on view from Oct. 23, 2005, to Jan. 16, 2006. Hujar’s work was also included in the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s group exhibition “East Village USA.”

A retrospective exhibition of the work of Lexington, Ky., optometrist and photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925–72) consisted of more than 150 prints from the archives of the University of Kentucky, organized by the ICP, where it was on view Dec. 10, 2004–Feb. 27, 2005. The show, which later traveled to the Fraenkel Gallery and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Ariz., represented Meatyard’s exploration of the themes of childhood and loss. Employing darkness, shadows, and masks, Meatyard developed a melancholic sensibility in the midst of a deep Southern mythology.

On display through February 27 at the ICP, which also organized the show, was “Bill Owens: Leisure”; it was also exhibited March 3–April 30 at the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco and featured previously unseen images from Owens’s “Suburbia” series, made between 1968 and 1980; these constituted the final installment of four projects, each of which focused on a different aspect of the emergence of suburban life since the late 1960s. A July–September exhibit in New York City also included images from “Suburbia” (1972), “Our Kind of People” (1976), and “Working: I Do It for the Money” (1978), as well as newly published work in the “Leisure” series.

In Beverly Hills, Calif., Gregory Crewdson’s “Beneath the Roses” was on view May 21–July 16 at Gagosian Gallery and opened concurrently with shows at White Cube, London, and Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York City. Crewdson’s cinematic photography, depicting extraordinary events in quite ordinary places, required the collaborative efforts of an entire movie crew to stage. Crewdson’s view of middle-class America explored the psychological impact of the banal and the alienation of life in the suburbs through “disturbing dramas at play within quotidian environments.”

Robert Adams’s “Turning Back: A Photographic Journal of Re-exploration” was exhibited Sept. 29, 2005–Jan. 3, 2006, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA). Accompanied by a catalog of the same name, the show displayed Adams’s newest work, which was inspired by the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The images on view retraced the territory covered by the famous explorers. “Robert Adams: Circa 1970,” shown September 8–October 29 at the Fraenkel Gallery, presented the first exhibition of rare vintage prints from the series “The New West” and “Denver.” This work explored the transformation of the American landscape in 1967–73 and was collected in two books that were considered photographic landmarks of the past half century.

The first photography exhibition of 2005 in the newly renovated Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York City, was on view March 4–May 30 and showcased Thomas Demand’s work, which challenged the notion of a document through carefully constructed images that began as paper models of historically meaningful sites and were then photographed by the artist, who was trained as a sculptor. The show was the largest American survey of Demand’s work to date and included 25 images from the past 12 years.

A major retrospective at MoMA of Lee Friedlander was on view June 5–August 29. The exhibition traveled to Haus der Kunst, Munich, Nov. 16, 2005–Feb. 12, 2006, and presented nearly 500 prints that spanned a 50-year career, revisiting the diverse interests of a multifaceted artist whose many projects included portraiture, landscape, still life, and architectural studies. Concurrent with his major retrospective at MoMA, another New York show, “Five Decades,” was offered June 11–July 29 at the Janet Borden Gallery.

John Szarkowski was the subject of a photographic exhibition that originated at SFMoMA in February. The companion book John Szarkowski: Photographs featured 84 tritone images and an essay by SFMoMA curator Sandra Phillips. The show traveled in June to the Center for Creative Photography and in September to the Milwaukee (Wis.) Art Museum. MoMA was to host the exhibition in 2006.

An exhibition of topographic photographer Stephen Shore, which originated at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna in 2004, was presented from June to mid-October 2005 at the Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles, and traveled in mid-November to Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver. The show exhibited 120 prints from two major series, “Uncommon Places” and “American Surfaces,” which defined the vernacular of the 1970s sociological American landscape. Meanwhile, the Shore exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Arts Center presented a selection of more than 300 images from Shore’s series “American Surfaces” and coincided with an updated publication of the landmark book of the same name.

“End of Time” at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, surveyed the entire body of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s work. The exhibition opened in September 2005 and was scheduled to travel in February 2006 to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Sugimoto explored abstraction, focusing on the formal qualities of light and time. The retrospective exhibition included work from “Dioramas,” “Seascapes,” “Theatres,” “Portraits,” “Architecture,” “Sea of Buddha,” and “Conceptual Forms.” The show also included “Colors of Shadow,” new never-before-presented colour photographs of the changing light in the artist’s studio.

Art and Art Exhibitions: Year In Review 2005. (2015). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1090500/Art-and-Art-Exhibitions-Year-In-Review-2005/250312/Photography

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